by Ryan Walker •

InsideSales.com Product Review

Overview

Insidesales.com CRM is a very ambitious product. It has a LOT of functionality. Unfortunately it’s got too many flaws for me to recommend it. I’m posting this review, as a current customer, as incentive for them to improve the product, in particular, my issues with it.

Sales Process

Their sales process was impeccable, and the rep we got was very sharp and helpful (thank you, Ben!). Not too pushy, let us evaluate on our own time.

I was a little bit concerned by the apparent lack of polish on the app, but assumed the internals were strong, that they just didn’t have a “great” UI design lead, which I can forgive. The price was significantly lower than Salesforce, so I let it go.

We knew we’d be heavy user of SOAP API, we reviewed docs and had some concerns there, but not enough to kill the deal.

Implementation

Weaknesses in the software begin to manifest.

  • Lead import would occasionally lock the entire server (reps on phone affected.) They did respond quickly to resolve this, but it really shouldn’t be allowed to happen.
  • We were given API docs for 2.0, SOAP endpoints for 1.6, documentation was very sparse. Once we finally figured that out (I had to get sales rep back involved to give me a contact that could understand our problem.) Once we got 2.0 endpoints, the code was untested, we had at least a half-dozen back and forths trying to just get the API to work as advertised. This cost us weeks.
  • Training was weak, and after toying around with the product for a few weeks I actually corrected the trainer about how converting leads to Account/Contact works.

Production - Current State

** Note: I’ll adjust this section as new issues are uncovered and old issues resolved **

Pros:

  • Dialer works - our sales reps are more productive.
  • Dialer initiatives are very flexible and work great.
  • Total talk time reports are very good management tools.
  • Support team is responsive.

Cons:

Support:

  • Support tickets disappear from our UI when they resolve them, and we can’t see progress on tickets. I’d love to see them move to an off-the-shelf support system like Tender or ZenDesk, losing their homegrown system.
  • Support team’s technical knowledge doesn’t go very deep, and I had to go outside the process to get my urgent API issues worked on. Support has acknowledged that their exposure to API issues is limited, but I’d like to see a smooth escalation process on their end for these issues.

Accounts:

  • Duplicate accounts cannot be merged! Contacts have to be moved manually. (Even though there is a “Merge Accounts” button.)
  • A user asking “sales administrator” can’t convert leads without it changing them to the owner. We have significant cleanup to do after import, we’ll have to login as each user to avoid extra steps.
  • Can’t convert a lead that has an existing account without duplicating the account.

Mass email:

  • Mass email process is a bit backwards - must create a template then can email all contacts in an account, but it doesn’t provide any verification that the content merged in well before saying “OK, scheduled to send.”
  • I couldn’t find anywhere to see a list of send jobs pending or completed.

General:

  • URLs are not canonical - when looking at a lead URL is something like https://recruitmilitary.insidesales.com/leads/lead?itemOffset=0 where it should be https://recruitmilitary.insidesales.com/leads/{id} - something that can be cut and pasted + shared

  • App is somewhat ugly - lots of different font sizes, kludgy UI in spots

  • Application is optimized for Internet Explorer; some things don’t work in Firefox

    • Pages don’t fit the browser - bottom scrollbar often when doesn’t need to be there (maybe Firefox only)
    • Form designer barely works in Firefox

API & Import:

  • SOAP API is very basic, not all objects fully implemented (for example, can’t import product details for a deal)
  • Report (summarized) data not available in API
  • API returns deleted LEAD records, no way to filter them out. We had to ask for a purge of test data.
  • Account/contact import is broken, we had to import hundreds of thousands of records through individual SOAP API interactions.

Reports:

  • Reports present data that contradicts other reports.
  • There is a beta reporting system pasted in there, but not cohesive with other report lists.

JabberDog:

  • Can’t archive past JabberDog jobs, so the dropdown continues to grow and grow.

Updates:

  • In April 2011, I had a nice call with Ken Krogue regarding this blog post, and his committment to doing what it takes to win us over and convert this blog post to a positive review. I look forward to that journey, it will help both of our businesses in the long run. More to come :)
Filed under Customer Relationship Management Web Application Reviews